The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (50 page)

Boccaccio was only forty when he completed the
Decameron
and provided the classic prototypes of the modern short story.
Novella
—a little new
thing—was the name given to Boccaccio’s tales. They differed from anecdotes, which came from anybody’s lips in the marketplace, by being contrived into “the artful pattern of a plot.” Each of these hundred “new little things,” was a hint and an inspiration for others who one day would make a large new thing, not a “novella,” but a “novel.”

After completing the
Decameron
, about 1353, Boccaccio lived on for more than twenty years. Then he retreated from the turbulent currents of everyday life to the conventional themes of his youth. The person responsible for this retreat was the lodestar of Renaissance humanism, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374). Born nine years before Boccaccio, Petrarch was acclaimed as the greatest scholar of his age. Son of a lawyer in Arezzo, he was taken to Avignon by his father, who hoped for employment in the exiled papacy. Under pressure from his father he studied law at Montpellier but was luckily liberated to sate “an unquenchable thirst for literature.” After taking minor religious orders, Petrarch enjoyed halcyon years in the household of Cardinal Colonna in Avignon. There, at the age of twenty-three he met the legendary Laura, to whom he would write his
Canzoniere
, the series of poems in her praise that established his place in Italian literature.

A celebrity for his pursuit of Latin classics, Petrarch searched monastic libraries, actually discovering a rich cache of Cicero’s letters at Verona. His models were not the medieval scholastics but Cicero, Virgil, and Saint Augustine. Like many another celebrity, Petrarch luxuriated in public adulation while professing to yearn for solitude, and he even wrote a treatise on the virtues of the solitary life. In 1340, perhaps at his instigation, both Paris and Rome invited him to be crowned as their poet laureate. Of course he chose Rome, was crowned on the Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341, and then deposited his laurels at the tomb of Saint Peter. His Laura died of the Black Death on April 6, 1348, the twenty-first anniversary of their first meeting. Everywhere on his diplomatic travels and from his retreat in Vaucluse he celebrated the Latin classics and their relevance to the Christian tradition.

Boccaccio’s meeting with Petrarch in Florence in 1350 marked a reverse in the direction of his work from the human comedy and the broad humanism of the ancients to the textual humanism of medieval scholars. Even before the
Decameron
his writing had been in Italian. Afterward he wrote mostly in Latin. He had prepared himself for discipleship by writing a Latin biography of Petrarch. But Petrarch was condescending to the
Decameron
, which he never claimed to have read fully. Finally, in 1373, charitably noting that he had enjoyed “a hasty perusal,” Petrarch explained that it was “a very big volume, written in prose and intended for the masses.” The “sometimes
too free” tone of the book, he told Boccaccio, might be condoned because of “your age at the time and in view of the public to which the book is addressed.”

Boccaccio, under Petrarch’s spell, acquired the enthusiasm of a born-again Christian humanist, a devotee of classical scholarship. Though neither he nor Petrarch could read Greek, they enjoyed reverently viewing Greek manuscripts of Homer and Plato. Boccaccio had a hand in creating at the University of Florence the first professorship of Greek in Western Europe, then brought its first incumbent, Leontius Pilatus, to live in his house. The appointment lasted only two years, for the Florentines had hoped the professor would instruct them in “commercial” Greek for their business. It was only through Pilatus’s crude Latin translations that Boccaccio and Petrarch came to know Homer.

A frightening visit that Boccaccio received in 1362 confirmed his repentance for the
Decameron
. A holy man who came to his house brought word of the prophetic deathbed vision of a Carthusian monk, the Blessed Petroni. Jesus told Petroni that both Petrarch and Boccaccio would soon die and be eternally damned if they did not promptly turn away from profane studies like poetry and literature, and focus their thoughts instead on the world to come. The terrified Boccaccio wrote to Petrarch announcing his determination to heed the saintly warning. He would give up literature, burn his own writings, and sell his library to Petrarch. But the complacent Petrarch reminded Boccaccio that death, the common lot of man, was not to be dreaded. “Be reasonable,” he wrote, “I know of many who have attained the highest saintliness without literary culture; I don’t know of any who were excluded from sanctity by culture.… All good men have the same goal, but there are numberless ways thither, and much variety for the pilgrim … the way of knowledge is certainly more glorious, illumined and lofty. Give me an example of a saint who arose from the mass of the unlettered, and I will match him with a greater saint of the other sort.” Still, if Boccaccio was determined to give up scholarship, Petrarch would consider buying his library for a fair price from an itemized list. He invited Boccaccio to come live with him “for our few remaining days, as I have always hoped and as indeed you once promised,” so they could share their libraries. Boccaccio never took up this invitation.

Under the influence of Petrarch, Boccaccio wrote ponderous Latin works. His encyclopedia of classical mythology,
Genealogies of the Pagan Gods
, which he continued to enlarge for the last twenty-five years of his life, remained the standard work for four centuries. And his early biographers extolled this book while ignoring the
Decameron
. Boccaccio’s last work of fiction, the curious misogynist
Corbaccio
(The Evil Crow) (1355) expressed in Italian prose his unhappy flight from the world of the
Decameron
.

Never having found the patron he sought, Boccaccio’s last years in Florence were beset by poverty. His Tuscan friends gave him employment by sending him as ambassador to Avignon and Rome. He made a meager living as a copyist, transcribing his own works for others. Finally, in October 1373, the Commune of Florence engaged him for a hundred florins to read aloud and comment on Dante’s
Divine Comedy
in the Church of San Stefano de Badia. He gave sixty such lecture-readings before his pains of gout and scabies and his obesity—and learned objections to his efforts to “vulgarize” Dante—put a stop to the series. The death of his mentor Petrarch in July 1374 added to his miseries, which Petrarch himself had generously tried to assuage by willing Boccaccio a valuable fur coat for cold nights in his study. Boccaccio died on December 21, 1375. In his last words in the epitaph he wrote for himself he affirmed that “he cherished the nourishing Muses.”

Like other classics of vernacular literature, the
Decameron
was widely read before academic critics dignified it by their attention. It was disseminated not through monastic scriptoria and university libraries but by Italian merchants who took copies with them across Europe. Not for the first or last time, authors were far ahead of scholars. Even after the book had delighted generations of readers, for centuries the translators insisted on remaining anonymous. It was a half-millennium before a translator of the
Decameron
into English dared sign his name to the work.

Even these anonymous early English translators proceeded with extreme caution. “Whenever met with any thing that seemed immodest or loose,” one explained in his preface, he had studied “so to manage the Expression, and conceal the Matter, that the fair Sex may read it without blushing.” Despite all these precautions, two and a half centuries passed before any apparently complete translation, perhaps by John Florio, appeared—in 1620. Modern English translations still kept certain troublesome passages (like the story of the innocent Alibech) decently veiled in the original Italian. Those who tried to fumigate Boccaccio served modern readers with a short list of the most interesting stories.

T
HE
pilgrim metaphor permeated Christian literature. It was embodied in drama, ritual, and travel adventure. What the tourist is in our twentieth-century West, the pilgrim was in the European Middle Ages. But while the modern tourist wanders in search of the interesting, the unexpected, and the titillating, the medieval pilgrim journeyed toward a certain end. His travel bore the stamp of orthodoxy. Like Jesus Himself, every follower of Jesus was a “pilgrim” (derived from the Latin
peregrinus
for stranger or foreigner) in this life, awaiting the eternal life to come.

By Chaucer’s time pilgrimage had become a flourishing institution. Across Europe Christians dramatized their faith by voyage to a sacred place. Jerusalem was, of course, the preferred destination, but Rome was a close second. The Jubilee Year, first so named by the bold and enterprising Pope Boniface VIII, in 1300 offered special indulgences to the pilgrims who came to Rome. The cult of saints and relics from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries multiplied pilgrim destinations, certified by miracles performed by the saints. On the Continent, after Rome the favored destination was Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. In England it was Canterbury, where innkeepers prospered from the crowds who came to share the sanctity of the life and death of Saint Thomas Becket.

When such places and their relics worked miracles, Aquinas explained, they were vehicles of the power of God. Some pilgrims went for penance.
A heinous crime, like that of the noble Frotmund who killed his father, was punished in 850 by perpetual pilgrimage. Such pilgrims traveling from shrine to shrine were condemned to a life in fetters that ended only when a saint miraculously broke their chains as a sign of forgiveness. Only after Frotmund had visited seven shrines were his chains finally broken in the little town of Redon in northwestern France. The powers of Saint Peter’s shrine in Rome were advertised by an impressive exhibit of broken fetters hanging from the altar. An unfulfilled vow to make a pilgrimage might bring divine punishment. When the English knight who had his broken arm healed by Saint James failed to make his promised visit to the saint’s shrine at Reading, the saint broke his other arm.

Pope Urban II at the end of the eleventh century developed the “indulgence,” a formal remittance of punishment for sins by visiting certain shrines. Pilgrims, like widows and orphans, had the legal status of a
miserabilis persona
, which gave them special protection en route to fulfill their vows. The crowds of pilgrims benefited innkeepers and merchants, while they enriched the churches. When Henry VIII dissolved the Canterbury Cathedral priory, he hauled away twenty-six cartfuls of jewels and precious metals, the gifts of grateful pilgrims.

Pilgrim shrines, too, like modern tourist centers, had their ups and downs. The appeal of the tomb of Saint Thomas at Canterbury, popular in the twelfth century, declined with rumors in the next century that the saint had lost his power to work miracles.

Pilgrimage had its own ritual. A pilgrim was blessed by a priest at the outset, took a special oath, carried a staff, and wore a distinctive garment, with a bag for provisions hanging at his side. When he returned home his hat bore the badge of the shrine he had visited. Like modern tourists, pilgrims organized in groups and engaged experienced guides to find the way and lead them to hospitable inns. Illustrated pilgrim Baedekers with maps noted sights along the way and warned of risks to health and purse.

To make his journey count for penance the pilgrim was expected to suffer. In addition to suffering the usual trials of medieval travel, the more devout would walk barefoot, while fasting and constantly praying. But as the institution became popular it became more pleasant, less a penance than a travel holiday. Pilgrims who joined the tours from Venice to Muslim Jerusalem went to see the exotic, buy souvenirs, and then write their own journals. Sir John Mandeville (who, if there was such a person, must have been a contemporary of Chaucer) wrote the most popular travel book of the age,
describing fountains of youth and monstrous animals, ostensibly to guide pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Dubious miracles increased with the competition for pilgrims. The Rood of Boxley, a life-size figure of Christ on the Cross that actually shed tears, rolled its eyes, and foamed at the mouth, was finally discovered to contain “certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back.”

After that Tuesday evening, December 29, 1170, when four knights of Henry II splashed the blood and brains of Archbishop Thomas Becket on the cathedral pavement, pilgrims traveled to the shrine of his martyrdom. From all over England they came and even from abroad. Their route from Southampton through Winchester to Canterbury is still called the Pilgrims’ Way. Some went to fulfill a vow made when they had recovered from illness or escaped disaster, some simply for penance, others to annoy the king by honoring his ancestral enemy. But kings came too. The barefoot Henry II, in haircloth and woolen shirt, hastened to Canterbury on July 12, 1174, to avoid excommunication. But many had no better reason than the modern tourist.

By Chaucer’s day (1340?–1400) pilgrimage had become a pleasurable, emphatically secular, and delightfully sociable adventure.